A brand persona is the personification of your brand: if your company were a person, who would they be? It's built from your brand's values, tone of voice, and personality, and it turns an abstract set of guidelines into something concrete enough for your team to actually write, design, and speak from.
It's not the same as your brand identity, the visible elements like color, logo, and design, though the persona should inform those choices. And it's not a buyer or user persona either, since those represent your customer, not your brand. (More on exactly how all these terms differ below.)
In practice, a brand persona gives you a consistent answer to the question that comes up every time you brief a designer or write a piece of copy: does this sound and look like us? Businesses build brand personas to pin down their identity, values, mission, and tone of voice in one place, so every customer interaction feels like it's coming from the same, recognizable character.
Bryony Pearce
Brand persona vs. brand personality vs. buyer persona vs. mascot
Personality is the adjective list. Persona is what you get once those adjectives are turned into an actual character with a name and a voice.
A mascot is an optional visual costume for that character, Freddie the Mailchimp monkey is a mascot built around Mailchimp's brand persona, not the persona itself. A buyer persona is a different exercise entirely: it describes your customer, not your brand.
Examples of brand personas
There are many different real life examples where companies have brought their brand personas to life. Let’s look at some examples now.
Apple
Apple's persona is closer to Magician: minimalist, confident, and built around the idea that the product itself is the whole story.
A plain white background and a single line of copy, “Oh. So. Pro.”, do the work most brands would need a page of features to do.
Even its holiday campaigns stay sleek and understated, letting the product carry the aesthetic rather than reaching for seasonal clutter.
Old Spice
Old Spice is a textbook Jester: the “Old Spice Guy” campaign turned a decades-old grooming brand into something overly masculine, self-aware, and very funny on purpose.
It's the clearest example on this list of a persona built entirely around not taking itself seriously, and it's exactly why the campaign is still referenced as a case study over a decade later.
We’re sure you’ve seen one of the ads before, but here’s a little reminder.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp's persona is carried almost entirely by Freddie, its mascot: a quirky, fun monkey that makes an otherwise serious B2B marketing tech category feel approachable.
Freddie is a good real-world example of the mascot-vs-persona distinction covered earlier in this article, the monkey is the costume, but the persona underneath it, fun, quirky, a little irreverent, is what actually shows up in Mailchimp's product, app, and content.
Read more about the creation of Freddie here.
Nike
Nike's brand persona is a textbook Hero: bold, determined, and built entirely around overcoming obstacles. “Just Do It” is a call to courage, and every major campaign since has reinforced the same persona rather than drifting into a different tone.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola's persona is the Innocent: optimistic, simple, and built around shared happiness rather than any functional product benefit. The brand rarely talks about taste or ingredients; it talks about togetherness, which is exactly what the Innocent archetype is built to do.
Patagonia
Patagonia's persona is the Explorer: authentic, adventurous, and unwilling to compromise its values for a sale, its “Don't Buy This Jacket” campaign is the clearest example of a brand persona so consistent it will actively argue against a purchase to stay true to character.
The 12 brand archetypes
Most recognizable brand personas map onto one of 12 archetypes, adapted from psychiatrist Carl Jung's work on universal personality patterns by Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson in their book The Hero and the Outlaw.
You don't need to force your brand into exactly one box, but knowing the 12 gives you a shared vocabulary and a shortcut to a consistent tone of voice.
Why are brand personas important for product marketers to use?
Brand personality is becoming an increasingly important aspect of a brand, for many reasons. Here are some to think about:
Builds a connection with your target audience
A strong, positive brand personality incorporates a much-needed human element to your organization, which your consumer will be able to recognize and feel more connected with. This then creates a deeper relationship with your audience, hopefully then developing a stronger sense of loyalty towards your brand and product.
Establishes your brand’s core values
The actual exercise of creating your brand persona allows you and your team to identify and recognize the core values you want your company to stand for. This then provides you with the opportunity to hone in on these elements and communicate them to your audience effectively.
Brings intention and control to how your brand is perceived
Without a brand persona, it’s difficult to maintain or control the way your target audience perceives your company.
However, with a brand persona, you’re able to ensure that customers understand your company and what you stand for. This method allows you to outline your company’s goals, values, and tone of voice and helps you to develop your messaging and communication in a way that aligns with the personality you’ve built for your brand. It leaves no room for speculation and gives you more control over how your organization is perceived.
Differentiates your company from the competition
If you’re able to pinpoint what your company stands for and what makes it so special, you’ll automatically begin to separate your brand from the competition. Once you begin adding in your brand personality, tone of voice, customer interactions, etc, it morphs into a targeted company that’ll stand out from the crowd of similar brands and products.
How to build brand personas
Here is a simple framework that you can follow or adapt further to suit your company.
Create an overview of your brand
Begin by creating an overview of your brand. This’ll help you to identify which attributes you already have that stand out either positively or negatively and give you a better insight into how you’d like to refine your brand. This is helpful for when you’re building your persona, as you can then consciously highlight the most important attributes.
Get customer feedback on how they view your brand. You can then use this information to either reinforce these attributes or rewrite how you want your brand to be perceived.
Lift from your user personas
Identify the most important and effective user personas that you have created, and find characteristics within these personas that are the most common. Modeling your brand persona around popular traits that your target audience has is a really helpful trick to ensure that you’re consistently interacting and connecting with your target audience in the right way.
Of course, you have to be careful not to do this too much, because you run the risk of alienating certain segments of your target audience. However, there’ll be a few commonalities that bind your audience together, and you can use these to effectively relate to and engage with them.
Here at PMA, we have some incredible templates for user and buyer personas that make it easy to get started which you can access in the member’s area. Or, there's a simpler version below.
James Shaw
James Shaw
James Shaw
Build your brand’s personality traits
Humanizing your brand will help you to develop the parts of your persona that’ll begin to interact and connect with the audience. The goal is to completely encapsulate your company traits. Based on these, think about:
- What would your persona look like? Is it a person, animal, or another object?
- How does your brand want to be perceived? Friendly, reliable, trustworthy, fun, edgy?
- What fonts and colors match the persona? Put together a style guide to help your brand’s design.
- How would your persona speak? Create some examples of copy to help guide your team with a tone of voice. If you’ve got previous content, what worked and what didn’t? What got the most engagement?
- How would the persona engage with others? That'll be important for interacting with your target audience in the future.
- What is their relationship with the customer? Is your persona the leader, a listener, the advisor? What is it that your brand is offering?
Your persona can be anything, but you must map your brand’s personality on the important things that matter, like the tone of voice, design/graphic style, values, goals, etc.
Build the persona profile
Similar to how you’d build a buyer or user persona, begin building a profile for your brand based on the research you’ve done with the previous three steps. Here are some of the most common details that companies typically include:
- Name: Not the brand name- what would the persona be called?
- Age: This will likely be similar to the target audience age group.
- Bio: Have a brief outline or description of the persona, including their background, what they’re like, etc.
- Hobbies: What non-business-related activities would your persona enjoy?
- Likes and dislikes: Again, these may be similar to the target audience’s traits to be able to relate to them more.
- Language: Use examples and quotes for how your persona would speak.
- Motivation: What reaction are you trying to receive from your target audience with this persona?
- Picture: Visualizing the persona is a handy trick to bring more authenticity to this exercise.
Of course, this is for internal use only, but it’s a helpful tool to bring more understanding to how you want your persona to be perceived, how you’ll communicate to the consumer, and who you’re aiming your brand towards.
Brand persona profile template
The list above tells you what to include. Here's what it looks like filled in, with two additions, personality type and archetype, that tie the profile directly to the framework in Section 2.
Duplicate this table once per persona if you're building more than one (see the FAQ on how many personas a company needs, at the end of this article), and keep the filled example on hand as a reference for what “done” looks like when new team members build their first one.
How to align your social campaigns with your brand personas
Now that you have a deeper understanding of who your brand represents, its goals, how it would communicate to the target audience… it’s a lot easier to focus on aligning your brand persona with your social campaigns.
Use the personality you’ve created to strengthen your messaging. Apply this tone of voice consistently and purposefully to all social content to strengthen the brand persona you’ve spent time building.
Stay close to your brand community. The people who are engaging with your content are the most important people to gauge whether your content is working.
Remember that social media is constantly evolving. Jokes, language, style, and social trends change every day, so continue to research and stay on top of the latest topics to ensure that you’re consistently creating relatable and engaging content for your target audience.
FAQs
What's the difference between a brand persona and a brand personality?
Brand personality is the list of human traits attributed to a brand, words like “friendly,” “bold,” or “innovative.” A brand persona is what you get once those traits are built into an actual character: a name, an age, a tone of voice, sometimes even a face. Personality is the adjectives; persona is the person.
How many brand personas should a company have?
Most companies should build one core brand persona and keep it consistent across every channel.
If you run genuinely distinct product lines for different audiences, a slight variation in tone within that one persona is usually safer than building entirely separate personas, since multiple personas under one brand name tend to dilute the consistency a persona is supposed to create in the first place.
The exception is a company running clearly separate sub-brands with their own distinct positioning, where a persona each can make sense.
How does a brand persona influence visual identity?
Once a persona's traits and archetype are set, visual choices should follow from that character rather than the other way around.
A Jester persona points toward bright colors, playful fonts, and casual imagery, in the same way Old Spice's ads lean loud and irreverent. A Ruler persona points toward a minimal, premium palette and restrained typography, in the same way Mercedes-Benz rarely uses more than a couple of colors in a campaign.
If a color palette or font choice doesn't match the tone of voice already established for the persona, it's usually the visual choice that's wrong, not the persona.
Want to learn more?
Our Persona Masters: Certified course guarantees that you’ll walk away with new ideas sure to revolutionize your current approach to building your personas.
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:
- Create, build, and deliver personas that work.
- Streamline the persona process by focussing only on extracting and mining data that drive bottom-line impact.
- Take your entire company’s product, marketing, sales, and customer-focussed efforts to the next level.
- Get everyone in your org rallied around your personas and demonstrate the tangible value they deliver.
- Understand where and when personas should be used and provide clear use cases to key stakeholders across the business.
- Show off your shiny new certificate to everyone in your network.
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